Twitter Brand pages to be upgraded for major spenders

As soon as Feb. 1, we could see more brand pages, gaming, shopping on Twitter site

No one can claim that Twitter is resting on its laurels when it comes to getting brands to work with them.

Reports are coming out that next week Twitter will expand who, what and how brands advertise on the popular microblogging platform. While Twitter introduced a limited selection of brand pages in December, which 20+ companies got invitations to start, Feb.1 could mark the day that more companies roll out brand pages and new functions as long as they've already commited $25,000, according to AdAge.

Currently, the brand pages have been designated to the big global companies that already spend a lot of cash on advertising and promoted tweet on the site, such as Nike, Coca-Cola, Disney Pixar and HP.

These brand pages have allowed companies to customize the landing page for their central Twitter handle and feature certain content on the top of the page, while making other Twitter correspondences lower on the page -- so that no matter how often the company tweets (or people tweet at it) a video clip or promoted item will remain on the top of the page.

Word has it that the brand page will soon allow even more levels of interaction and start moving the way that Facebook fan pages have. In the very near future, those visiting a brand page could play games or shop right on the page. 

Twitter was not available to comment on the new brand rollout.

You can see the difference between some of the enhanced brand pages:

And some that haven't gotten the invite:

If the case is that Twitter is inviting brand page status to its top advertisers it could prove to be very lucrative to any company teetering near the $25,000 mark and push them over, but is likely to create a lot of buzz about the democracy of the Web.

I personally think this could be a viable way for Twitter to create positive revenue while keeping the service free for the average user -- as long as it doesn't mean cluttering up my feed with an onslaught of irrelevant featured and promoted tweets. 

Last month, Twitter also partnered with several charities, including the American Red Cross to create similar brand pages for their causes.

Since many campaigns take more than 140 characters to showcase their product or brand, many companies will gravitate toward the opportunity of giving their advertising more breathing room on they landing page.

Twitter's global ad revenue is estimated to reach $400 million in 2013, from the $139.5 million expected from 2011, according to eMarketer in great part due to all the different ways it has introduced advertising, from promoted tweets to sponsored accounts.

This looks to be another experiment on how Twitter can diversify the content it offers on its sight and could be promising for other companies like gaming developers or news publishers if the site is successfully in showing it can handle more social elements than short blurbs and links -- the question is: Is that what we want from Twitter? I am not sure that I want Twitter to look like a Google+ page or a Facebook fan page. I kind of value the simplicity. But maybe it is the simplicity that limits revenue-generating opportunities 

I'll hold out too much judgement until we see just what these newer brand pages look like.

(Image Source: Iplawforstartups.com)